Editorials

It’s time for the post-election post-mortems in California races, now that a significant number of the votes in all categories have been counted. First, the one that shocked everyone around here. 

That would be the Yes on 8 vote, incomprehensible to the ordinary Bay Area voter, especially to those of us who spend most of our time in Berkeley. On many blocks, at least half the houses had No on 8 signs. On election day, earnest No sign-wavers were on every street corner and outside every polling place around here. So what happened? 

In technical terms, it’s called “preaching to the choir.” It’s a truism that it’s important to energize your base before trying to make converts, but it’s also important to educate and inform the undecided, especially in the nether world of ballot initiatives, where what seems like a clear No can easily morph into Yes in the mind of the confused voter.  

Around here, most of us and our kids and grandkids have friends who have two moms or two dads, and we take this for granted. A six-year-old of our acquaintance went along with her (one of each) parents to the post-election demonstration in San Francisco, but she simply couldn’t understand who would want to take away one of her friend Eric’s moms or why. 

But any one who travelled in the hinterlands of rural California pre-election saw a completely different picture. There almost every farmhouse had a Yes sign. It’s partly just culture: two-dad families still prefer to live in urban centers where they’re less conspicuous, but that allows voters elsewhere to form crazy mental images of who they are and what they do.  

No on 8 organizers were lulled into complacency by an early Field poll which showed their side leading, but which probably just reflected the consensus among informed voters. When the uninformed voters started thinking about how to vote, they made some bad decisions. 

It’s too easy just to blame white and African-American Evangelical Protestants, or Catholics, or Mormons, or even Obama voters. The good news about this election is that it brought out many inexperienced voters, but that’s also the bad news. Many of those who voted Yes on 8 didn’t realize that they were voting to deprive a significant segment of the population of basic civil rights. Many seem to have thought they were just expressing their opinion on what they regarded as a religious issue.  

Inevitably as a result of the enormous role played by religious organizations in this campaign, people are asking why churches are given tax exemptions when they clearly functioned as political entities in this election. A movement to change this is afoot. 

A better-organized No campaign might have highlighted the real effects of the amendment on real people in human terms while acknowledging religious differences. No on 8 backers turned down an offer from Arnold Schwarzenegger to make commercials on their behalf, a major mistake. Yes on 8 proponents fielded a well-funded robo-call campaign targeting African-American voters with deliberately misleading information. A San Francisco friend got several such calls, but none on the other side from No on 8.  

My own preferred solution is to get the state out of the marriage business altogether. The state doesn’t regulate baptisms or bar mitzvahs, so why marriages? The state should regulate civil unions in which willing combinations of people agree to take care of one another if the need arises and to share benefits with each other and with dependents. The sex part should be none of the state’s business.  

“Marriage,” whatever that might mean to participants, should be just a religious ceremony, with no tax deductions or other benefits attached. Ministers, rabbis and even priests would be free to “marry” anyone their dogma allowed them to, but if spouses wanted the legal advantages conveyed by the state a civil union would also be required.  

And what else can we learn from the election? In Berkeley, the defeat of LL and the success of KK showed clearly that voters might give the electeds the benefit of the doubt, but they’ll rap their knuckles if they screw up. Voters turned down LL’s predecessor Measure P, which was intended to be a pre-emptive strike at the Bates-Capitelli campaign to emasculate neighborhood and historic preservation at the behest of the building industry. But when the developer-controlled city council actually went ahead and enacted a bad new Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, citizens stopped it with a referendum. (The Yes on LL postcard, by the way, set a new record for most bold-faced lies on a single political mailer, but smart Berkeley voters weren’t fooled.) 

There could be a similar outcome with bus rapid transit, the proposal which sparked KK. Most voters rejected the initiative as drafted because they thought it was an unwieldy mechanism to control AC Transit’s manifest planning errors. Also, the manufacturers of the dread Van Hool busses managed to funnel many thousands of dollars into the No on KK campaign through a sneaky maneuver, which didn’t hurt. But if the Berkeley City Council makes a bad call on implementing BRT, it can still be revoked by referendum, just as the bad new landmarks law was.  

Councilmember Capitelli’s squeaker in District 5 and Jesse Arreguin’s resounding victory over Terry Doran, the developers’ anointed candidate in District 4, clearly showed that Berkeley voters now have their eyes on the ball, if they didn’t before. Sophie Hahn came within 200 votes of knocking off an incumbent, which is usually considered almost impossible. Rumors that Capitelli is Bates’ designated successor will have to be evaluated in light of his near-loss to a more progressive candidate in a conservative district, which speaks poorly for his chances in a city-wide race. It will be difficult for the Berkeley City Council to go forward with business as usual—voters are looking for change. 

In Oakland and Richmond, change also ran well. Rebecca Kaplan knocked off Don Perata’s pick for the at-large city council seat. Richmond actually voted to tax Chevron, as well as electing two of the three progressives who ran.  

Berkeley voters showed once again that they are willing to pay what government costs, within reason, by passing all the tax measures they were offered. Being basically intelligent and sensible people, we are leery of trying to control policy just by cutting off funds—a cleaver of a solution when a scalpel, or at least a carving knife, would yield better results. Referendums and initiatives are also clumsy ways to influence government. 

On the other hand, entrenched representatives doing 20-year stints in perfectly homogeneous districts is not good either, as any student of the history of the California legislature can confirm. Three out of five Berkeley council seats were essentially or actually uncontested in this election, and the mayor’s race was just a re-run of ancient grudges between two old adversaries. Only two districts spawned real contests, and that was only because the incumbent died in one of the two.  

The time has come for thoughtful citizens to start looking at suggestions for charter revisions to solve some of these problems. Sharon Hudson’s recent proposals in this section, which can be found online in Planet archives, are an excellent place to start.